Some Louisiana conservatives are raising questions about the lack of deliberation that has gone into this bill and expressing concerns about the centralizing tendencies of this measure. Who knows if these concerns will be heard or addressed.

A source in the Louisiana legislature tells me that the issues of local control raised in HB974 and HB976 do not even seem to be on the radar of most Senate Republicans (in his/her opinion). Perhaps this issue will be on the radar before the Senate votes in favor of it; grassroots pressure might still change things.

But, unless it does, the education package supported by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and his allies in the "reform" community looks to be heading in the direction of passage.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Last week, the Louisiana House passed HB974,
which would reform teacher tenure in that state, with a bipartisan
majority. This measure radically weakens teacher tenure: in order to
receive tenure, a teacher must be rated "highly effective" for five out
of six years. If this teacher is ever rated as "ineffective," he or she
immediately loses tenure. At least 50% of a teacher's effectiveness
evaluation will depend upon value-added test score data. Republicans
were not united in the passage of HB974 in the Louisiana House. Indeed,
without the support of Democrats, this measure would not have passed. The Louisiana State Senate is due to consider this measure shortly: the Education Committee seems currently scheduled to review the legislation on Thursday.

Some "conservative" groups are celebrating the passage of this bill.
This celebration might be more than a little ironic, however, because
HB974 seems a text taken straight from the annals of radical
progressivism (or perhaps progressive radicalism) rather than
traditional conservatism. Rather than running schools as community
enterprises, HB974 pushes in the direction of a quasi-corporate power
structure---with centralized power and a preponderance of statistical diktats.

There's much more to this measure than merely redefining the terms
of tenure. HB974 weakens the power of a town or city to govern its
schools. Under old law, local school boards were the ultimate
decision-makers in hiring: the recommendations of school administrators
had to be approved by them (and the boards could reject the
recommendations of superintendents and principals). Not anymore.
Under HB974, boards delegate their authority to superintendents. Rather
than the superintendent being an academic advisor and leader for a
public school, he or she acquires CEO-like powers. Superintendents and
principals become the ones with the authority to hire and fire under this new
measure.

Moreover, the state further ties school board hands. School boards must
establish contracts with performance targets for superintendents. If these targets are not
met, the superintendent's contract must not be renewed. For districts
including at least 75% of Louisiana schools (ones that do not receive an
"A" or "B" rating from the state), HB974 specifies in further detail the kinds of
targets a superintendent's contract must include. Whenever a school
board decides not to renew a superintendent's contract (for the moment,
school boards still have that power), it must file a report with the
state explaining its actions. If budget cuts come and staff must be
reduced, HB974 offers a formula
for how staff must be reduced, with the least "effective" faculty member
in an academic area being let go first. So much for local discretion.

Moreover, tenure under HB974 ain't quite what it used to be. Tenure
protections are radically weakened by HB974, in ways that might to make
traditional conservatives nervous (and not only traditional
conservatives, either). Consider the legislative language describing
how a tenured teacher may be dismissed under HB974 (the numbers are line numbers in the bill text):

A teacher with tenure shall not be removed from office
4 except upon written and signed charges of poor performance,willful neglect of duty,
5 or incompetency, dishonesty, or immorality, or of being a member of or contributing
6 to any group, organization, movement, or corporation that is by law or injunction
7
prohibited from operating in the state of Louisiana, and then only
furnished with a copy of such written charges and given the opportunity
to
9 respond. The teacher shall have seven days to respond, and such response shall be
10 included in the teacher's personnel file. At the end of this seven-day time period, the
11 superintendent may terminate the teacher's employment. A teacher shall not be
12 terminated for an "ineffective" performance rating until completion of the grievance
13 procedure established pursuant to R.S. 17:3883(A)(5) if a grievance was timely filed.
14 Within seven days after dismissal, a teacher may request and upon request shall be
15 granted a hearing by a panel
16 composed of a designee of the superintendent, a designee of the principal or the
17 administrative head of the state special school in which the teacher was employed,
18 and a designee of the teacher. In no case shall the superintendent, the principal or
19 state special school administrative head, or teacher designate an immediate family
20 member or any full-time employee of the school system by which the teacher was
21 employed who is under the supervision of the person making the designation.

The key detail about this language is that a tenured teacher need
not be found guilty of these charges of poor performance, willful
neglect of duty, incompetence, dishonesty, or immorality in order to be
dismissed (as current Louisiana law requires). Instead, HB974 only
requires that the teacher be given the charges in writing and be given
the opportunity to address these charges. The charges could be
completely mendacious, and the tenured teacher could still lose his or her job
at the superintendent's whim.

Current Louisiana law gives school boards the power to review
appeals for tenure dismissal. As it does with many other traditional
local powers, HB974 strips the school board of this authority and
instead gives the superintendent the ability to review the teacher's
case.

If the teacher wishes to appeal the superintendent's decision, he
or she enters a kind of kangaroo court, where three people review this ruling: a designee of the superintendent, a designee of the
principal, and a designee of the teacher. Under HB974, the principal
serves under the superintendent, so the panel called to review the
superintendent's decision would be stacked 2-1 with people either appointed by the superintendent or someone under the superintendent's control (the principal). So much for due process. (Conceivably, the teacher could then try to appeal to a court to reverse this decision, but this appeal could place considerable costs upon a teacher.)

The superintendent under HB974 basically has the ability to hire and
fire at will---regardless of tenure. Checks and balances are
effectively removed. It's hard to see how this radical power is in
accord with conventional Republican and conservative principles of
diffusion of public power and an emphasis on local control. (And, yes,
public schools are public institutions, and these schools are in part funded by local tax dollars.)

Moreover, in enshrining value-added testing performance for teacher
evaluations, HB974 idolizes bureaucratic instruments in a way that seems
utterly divorced from conservatism. As New York City's recent value-added testing data dump shows,
the results of value-added teacher evaluations can be totally arbitrary as well as disconnected from reality. Conservatives have made a lot of
conceptual and political headway since the 1960s by pointing to the
absurd results that centralized bureaucracies could lead to; it seems a
rather sad turn, then, for purported conservatives to be embracing such
bureaucracies.

Measures that deify value-added testing would seem to give power to
the ultimate unelected bureaucrats: those who design these tests and
create the complex (and quite possibly flawed) equations used to
determine value-added knowledge. HB974 would seem to accelerate the
tendency in Louisiana to wrest control of schools from the local
community and transfer it to an appointed (in the case of
superintendents) and unelected few.

If someone were interested in centralizing schooling in Louisiana,
HB974 combined with HB976 (which expands the power of charter schools
and certain central state agencies) would be a good way to do it. It's
no surprise that some Tea Party groups in Louisiana
are beginning to mobilize against this measure. HB974's tendencies
would seem to go against the small, localized government that many Tea
Partiers claim to support. In the days ahead, perhaps Louisiana will
witness the unlikeliest of odd couples: teachers unions and Tea Partiers
coming together to defend the tradition of local governance. Some solid conservatives in the Louisiana House opposed this bill due to their
skepticism about big-government schemes. Republicans hold a much stronger hand in
the state senate; perhaps traditional conservatives will collaborate
with union allies to halt or slow this move toward centralization.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

David C. Levy attempts to blame faculty salaries at universities for rising tuition costs and suggests that most university faculty are not working hard enough:

But I disagree with the next assumption, that the answer to rising
college costs is to throw more public money into the system. In fact,
increased public support has probably facilitated rising tuitions.
Overlooked in the debate are reforms for outmoded employment policies
that overcompensate faculty for inefficient teaching schedules.
Through
the first half of the 20th century, faculties in academic institutions
were generally underpaid relative to other comparably educated members
of the workforce. Teaching was viewed as a “calling” in the tradition of
tweed jackets, pipe tobacco and avuncular campus life. Trade-offs for
modest salaries were found in the relaxed atmospheres of academic
communities, often retreats from the pressures of the real world, and
reflected in such benefits as tenure, light teaching loads, long
vacations and sabbaticals.
With the 1970s advent of collective
bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result has
been more equitable circumstances for college faculty, who deserve
salaries comparable to those of other educated professionals. Happily,
senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000
to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with
advanced degrees.

But I'd like instead to look at Levy's implicit claim that faculty salaries are disproportionately contributing to tuition inflation. Nowhere does Levy really address the fact that colleges and universities are increasingly using part-time faculty members (with much lower rates of pay and usually without benefits) to teach classes. Tenured and tenure-track faculty now only constitute 25% of faculty members in the US (compared to over 45% in 1975), according to the American Association of University Professors.

Moreover, full-time faculty salaries are not exactly skyrocketing. Adjusted for inflation, the average rate of tuition growth was about 6% a year between 1989 and 2005. During that same period, the average full-time faculty salary never increased above 2.2% a year adjusted for inflation (according to the AAUP). During most of those years, the salary growth was either negative when adjusted for inflation or under 1%. So it's hard to blame faculty salaries for skyrocketing tuition costs. Nor can the growth in faculty numbers be blamed (since faculty hiring is well behind administrative hiring).

You can't blame faculty salaries for increases
in tuition and costs. Faculty salary increases have been well below
increases in tuition and well below increases in senior administrators'
salaries, which have increased disproportionately....Between 1995-96 and 2005-06, presidential salaries increased by 35
percent, adjusted for inflation, compared to 5 percent for average
faculty salaries (figure 3, 2006-07 Annual Report on the Economic Status
of the Profession );
from 2005-06 to 2007-08, the two-year increase in senior
administrators' salaries outpaced both inflation and the increase in
average salary for full professors (figures 1 and 2, 2007-08 Annual
Report on the Economic Status of the Profession).

You can't blame increases in faculty numbers for
increased tuition and costs. Full-time tenure-track faculty numbers
have increased at a far slower rate than have numbers of other
professionals and administrators. Between 1976 and 2005, full-time
tenure-track positions in the United States increased by only 17
percent, compared to a 281 percent increase in nonfaculty professionals
and a 101 percent increase in administrators (see figure 3 in the
2007-08 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession).

Spending on instruction has declined
in all sectors of higher education, while spending on administrative
costs has increased. Between 1995 and 2006, overall spending increased,
but the share of instruction was down in all sectors (for example, in
public master's institutions it was down from 53.9 to 50.8 percent; in
private master's institutions it was down from 45.0 to 43.0 percent).
The share of student services increased (from 9.9 to 10.9 percent in
public master's institutions and from 13.9 to 15.6 percent in private
master's institutions), as did that of administration and other support
(from 36.2 to 38.2 percent and from 41.1 to 41.4 percent, respectively...)

It's true that increasing teach loads might cause the amount a university spends on instruction to go down. But it is not clear that those savings would be passed on to students (rather than being captured by another group within the university). Nor is it clear that this action would not harm the quality of instruction and research done at American universities.

Larry J. Sabato suggests that control of the US Senate could come down to eight races:

Let’s assume that, at the dawn of the 113th Congress in 2013, all 67
sitting senators not up for reelection this year — 30 Democrats, 37
Republicans — return to serve next year (no departures for the Cabinet,
the Court or the Great Beyond). Next, let’s also assume that the 16
races we currently favor Democrats to win go to the Blue column, and the
nine races where Republicans are favored go to the Red column. (See our
full chart below.) Note that we have long flipped Nebraska and North
Dakota from Democratic control to Republican control; former Democratic
Sen. Bob Kerrey’s return to Nebraska hasn’t moved us a bit. Note also,
as we said above, we are assuming that Maine elects King, who in effect
becomes an Independent Democrat akin to Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman or
Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. Further, our analysis has Democrats holding
seats that are actually or potentially competitive, such as Ohio,
Michigan and Hawaii. Finally, we presume that Democrats don’t score
surprising upsets in places like Arizona and Indiana.
With those assumptions in place, the Senate is tied exactly
46 to 46, with eight toss up races to decide whether Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D) continues to lead the chamber, or whether Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R) takes over.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Many parts of the "Tea Party" establishment (certain large organizations and big "Tea Party" players) have been very critical of Mitt Romney so far. That may be about to change, as the Washington Times reports:

The organization that ignited the tea party as a national mass movement gave Mitt Romney
perhaps his biggest victory yet, deciding to drop its opposition to his
candidacy, a top executive in the group told The Washington Times.
FreedomWorks,
which organized the Sept. 12, 2009, mass demonstration on the Mall,
says that while it will not give an explicit endorsement, the time has
come for Republicans to unite around the former Massachusetts governor
and focus on defeating President Obama.
“It is a statistical fact that the numbers favor Mitt Romney,” FreedomWorks Vice President Russ Walker told The Times on Tuesday. “We are dedicated to defeating Obama and electing a conservative Senate that will help Romney repeal Obamacare and address the nation’s economic and spending challenges.”

FreedomWorks had originally protested against Romney, so for it to move to a position of neutrality---or even tepid support---is a big change.

Many grassroots Republicans apparently like Romney (a core 15%-20% has stayed with him throughout the whole primary, a bigger base of support than any other candidate has been able to muster consistently). However, many voices purporting to represent the grassroots had discounted Romney and criticized him as a traitor to conservatism (even if many "conservative" purists embraced him in 2008). After Romney's win in Illinois, we may see some of those voices lowering the volume or redirecting their wrath at Obama.

Politicians in both parties (and many of my colleagues at this magazine)
speak constantly of defending the interests of the middle class, but it
is precisely the middle class that will have to see higher taxes or
lower benefits or both if the country is to remain solvent. We could tax
the rich at 100 percent and still fail to balance the budget, and the
Bush tax cuts for the $200,000-and-up set are dwarfed by the Bush tax
cuts for the middle class. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of federal
transfer payments go to the non-poor, mainly to the middle class. It is
the middle class, not the wealthy, that enjoys relatively light
taxation.

The country might also take a big step toward solvency if the middle class saw its economic prospects improve. And it's worth noting that a considerable portion of "federal transfer payments" are Social Security payments, and that many middle class people have paid into Social Security their whole lives in order to have access to these payments.

Paul Ryan's new budget has come out. A common attack on this budget seems to be that it estimates that non-health, non-Social Security spending will be down to 3.75% of GDP by 2050. Since defense spending alone has not been under 3% of GDP since World War II, that 3.75% number may be hard to hit.

Derek Thompson says that Obama's and Ryan's budgets are answering two separate questions:

Ryan's budget answers the question: What's the best way to reduce the deficit by cutting government health care spending without doing something too unpopular? Obama's budget answers the question: What's the best way to pay for the social programs we have and the job investments we need?

Thompson's approach here is interesting---and the questions are provocative. However, perhaps the best way to pay for current social programs would be to turn around the economy by reinvigorating the employment prospects for the non-rich. Obama's policies have been perhaps less than successful in accomplishing that goal.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Is Dick Lugar going to be the Bob Bennett of 2012? Bennett was a popular Republican senator from Utah who was deemed too moderate for his Republican constituents, who replaced him with Tim Lee as the Republican nominee for Senate in 2010 (and who went on to win in November). Now, Lugar seems to be slipping in the polls against his Republican upstart challenger, Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. A while ago, Lugar held a double-digit lead over Mourdock; his lead is now down to 6 points (45-39).

Nate Silver suggests that Santorum should focus less on the "small ball" of accumulating pockets of delegates and more "game-changing" moves:

For Mr. Santorum to have a shot at winning the nomination, he will
need to poll at least 5 or 10 points better across the board than he has
so far — and to do so consistently enough that those polls translate
into votes and then delegates.
But polls usually do not shift
without a reason. They change on the basis of news, and Mr. Santorum’s
campaign has had trouble driving any of it.

Friday, March 16, 2012

During the week of Feb. 24, the New York City Education Department released data estimating the performance
(based on a value-added testing evaluation metric) of over 12,000
teachers in the city's public schools. The individual data sets were
requested by journalists, and these requests were at first resisted by
many advocates for education "reform." Evaluating teachers based on
student performance on standardized testing has become increasingly chic
within the "reform" community. In part to receive funding from
President Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, New York state
has recently put in place new measures that will tie a teacher's
overall evaluation to his or her value-added testing rating. New York's
"value-added" ratings attempt to estimate how much a teacher "improved"
students' performances on standardized tests while adjusting for
student past performance, demographics, and other factors.

Teach For America alum and current Stuyvesant High School math teacher Gary Rubinstein
recently dug into the raw teacher data -- and his findings have
potentially devastating implications for New York's testing regime.

There is next to no correlation
between a teacher's success in teaching a group of students one subject
and teaching that same group of students another subject.

There is very little correlation
between a teacher's success in teaching a subject at one grade level
and his or her success in teaching that same subject in a different
grade level in the same year.

Rubinstein makes many other intriguing points, but those three
conclusions are striking. They raise serious questions about New York's
value-added metrics.

The first result suggests little connection between a teacher's
performance one year and his or her performance the next. Rubinstein notes:

I found that 50% of the teachers had a 21 point 'swing' one way or the
other. There were even teachers who had gone up or down as much as 80
points. The average change was 25 points. I also noticed that 49% of
the teachers got lower value-added in 2010 than they did in 2009,
contrary to my experience that most teachers improve from year to year.

That 25-point swing makes the difference between a teacher performing
significantly above average (say with a score of 65) and significantly
below average (say with a score of 40). Are teachers really that uneven
from one year to the next? Perhaps teacher scores will fluctuate
within a certain range in the short term but stay within that range over
the long term, but, for many educational reform policy programs,
teachers would be evaluated on a year-to-year basis, and this kind of
swing in scores could hamper the effectiveness of such evaluation.
Moreover, this kind of swing suggests a huge margin of error in this
model's results. (Other analyses have also suggested this lack of year-to-year correlation and the wide margin of error in individual teacher evaluations based on these value-added metrics: According to the New York Times,
the math rating for a teacher could be off by as much as 35 percent
while the English rating could be off by as much as 53 percent.)

Rubinstein suggests various reasons why we should be skeptical of a data
set that shows very little correlation between a teacher's success in
teaching one subject and his or her success teaching another subject.
But perhaps the result that stands out the most is Rubinstein's finding
that, according to the NYC testing metrics, there is little correlation
between a teacher's success in teaching one subject at one grade level
and his or her success teaching the same subject (in the same year) at a
different grade level:

Out of 665 teachers who taught two different grade levels of the same
subject in 2010, the average difference between the two scores was
nearly 30 points [out of 100 points]. One out of four teachers, or
approximately 28 percent, had a difference of 40 or more points. Ten
percent of the teachers had differences of 60 points or more, and a full
five percent had differences of 70 points or more.

So a teacher could score a 70 in teaching math at the sixth grade level
while also scoring only a 40 in teaching math in the seventh grade level
during the same year -- and that's only the average swing between the
two scores. Rubinstein notes that one teacher he looked at scored a 97
teaching sixth-grade math while scoring a 6 -- yes, a 6 -- teaching
seventh-grade math in the same year. Is it highly likely that one
person could be truly exceptional teaching math to sixth graders while
also being utterly abysmal teaching math to seven graders? I guess it's
possible, but that's a very far-out possibility.

Even when one dismisses those outliers (even though such outliers could
still lose their jobs due to these test results), the average gap
between these two categories is huge. The testing metric of NYC thus
implies that there is almost no connection between a teacher's success
in teaching one grade level and his or her success teaching another
grade level, an assertion that flies in the face of observable
experience and the standards of common sense. There might not be a
perfect correlation between success at one level and success at another,
but for there to be almost none seems a very odd result. Common sense
is not always correct, but there is also a chance that highly
complicated technical instruments can be mistaken as well.

We can broaden these points. One of the dangers of elaborate
technocratic schemes is that they may produce results that are utterly
unconnected to real needs and may create organizational imperatives that
have no connection with realities. That's one of the reasons why
traditional conservatives have been skeptical about radically centrally
planned economies: the metrics of top-down bureaucrats, however
sophisticated, will not always accord with reality.

As I have written before,
it is unfortunate that some conservatives have forgotten the limits of
technocratic instruments when it comes to education reform. Instead,
many Republicans and supposed conservatives are doubling down on
testing-driven educational reform, making standardized tests the central
focus for student, teacher, and school evaluations. Yet Rubinstein's
analysis suggests that the value-added metrics of NYC, however
sophisticated, implicitly lead to results that seem to have little, if
any, basis in reality. And if this testing regime has led to such
results, we may have little reason to take any of its results seriously;
all results, and all conclusions drawn from them, may be utterly
poisoned by a false methodology.

Unfortunately, political power often has only a passing acquaintance
with reason, and many teachers will have to take these results quite
seriously indeed: their future employment may depend upon them. But the
prejudices of the powerful should not deter a forthright use of
reason. So we should ask: If this testing instrument, devised by the
largest and one of the most sophisticated school districts in the United
States, leads to conclusions that seem so utterly divorced from
reality, why should this instrument be used to decide the fate of
teachers? Maintaining real standards for education and encouraging
excellence are good things, but it is not yet clear that this testing
model helps achieve, or measures the achievement of, either goal. The
fact that a rabbit hole is bipartisan (as testing-driven "reform" is)
does not mean that it leads to a world that is any less fantastic.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Despite close victories in Alabama and Mississippi, Rick Santorum could very easily find himself further behind Mitt Romney in terms of the delegate count as a result of Tuesday's primaries. Why? In part because of Romney's crushing win in Hawaii.

Santorum's problem is that, for many of the significant primaries he wins, his margin of victory is small, and, in most states, this small margin of victory translates to a much smaller delegate lead. For example, Santorum's win in Oklahoma only netted him one delegate over Romney (14-13), and his Mississippi victory looks likely to do so as well. While Santorum has had some large margins of victory in a few states (such as Kansas and North Dakota), many of his victories are small ones; about half of his margins of victory are under six points, and many of his wins have come in relatively smaller states. These victories are enough to maintain media momentum, but they do not rack up the delegates.

Romney, on the other hand, has had numerous large margins of victory in numerous big states. He netted 38 delegates in Massachusetts, 50 delegates in Florida (a winner-take-all state), 16 delegates in Ohio (35-19 over Santorum), and so forth. Romney does have some smaller delegate margins in a number of states, but he also has had numerous big wins; these large wins in part account for his large delegate lead over Santorum and Gingrich.

In some ways, Rick Santorum finds himself in the position of Hillary Clinton in 2008 (though he is not running nearly as strongly as Clinton did): she won numerous big states (such as California and New York), but she didn't have as many crushing victory margins as Obama did. Obama used these big margins to get a significant delegate lead that Clinton was never able to overcome.

Under a proportional system, winning big matters. Obama used that to his advantage in 2008. So far, this emphasis on winning big has helped Romney. It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in the future. It perhaps should be noted, though, that many of the upcoming winner-take-all states are territory that would seem rather friendly to Romney (such as New Jersey and Utah). Moreover, if we keep seeing three-way Southern splits in the future (thanks in part to Newt Gingrich), it seems unlikely that Santorum will net many delegates on Romney from that region.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Heritage Foundation's Avik Roy looks at the health-care policies of Singapore and Switzerland to see what they can teach the USA about health-care reform. Both countries have much less per capita government spending on health-care than the US does; indeed, in the US, government spends more per capita on health-care than most European nations do (with the exceptions of Norway and maybe Luxembourg).

Monday, March 12, 2012

Sources close to the Gingrich campaign say preliminary "what-if"
conversations are underway that could lead to a Gingrich-Perry ticket
being announced prior to the Republican National Convention at the end
of August.
Gingrich insiders hope forming a predetermined ticket with Perry will unite the evangelical, Tea Party and very conservative voters that make up the core of the GOP.
As discussions got underway, a spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry released a statement saying, "Gov. Perry thinks Newt Gingrich
is the strongest conservative to debate and defeat President Obama and
truly overhaul Washington. The speculation is humbling but premature."

Such a plan might also help Gingrich with the conservative blogosphere, much of which was very sympathetic to Perry.

Meanwhile, it's a close race in Tuesday's Alabama Republican primary, with Gingrich seeming to have a one-point lead (if even that) over Romney and Santorum. And, according to the most recent Rasmussen poll, Romney leads both Gingrich and Santorum in Mississippi.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Gary Rubinstein has a great series of posts exploring the recently released evaluation data for New York City teachers. His analysis has some bad news for the value-added testing metrics of the city: these metrics might not necessarily mirror real-world qualities, suggesting that analyzing teacher performance through these metrics might be a problematic enterprise at best.

Consider this finding: based on New York's assessment methods, there is hardly any correlation between a teacher's success in teaching a subject at one grade level and his or her success at teaching that same subject in the next grade level. So a teacher who is supposedly successful teaching sixth-grade math could easily be one of the supposedly worst at teaching seventh-grade math. Does that seem particularly plausible? It might happen for some teachers, but Rubinstein finds almost no correlation for all teachers taken as a group.

Moreover, Rubinstein finds relatively little correlation between how successful a teacher is one year and how successful he or she is the next year. With such variation, this testing regime might have a few methodological problems.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Using the current Rush Limbaugh contretemps as a framing issue, William Jacobson raises a warning flag about some of the tendencies of contemporary political rhetoric:

I’m talking about the second-tier of the warfare, the attempt to intimidate those removed by one or more degrees of separation from the dispute, and to use them as tools against the target.

We have seen it a number of times in the past couple of years.
When King & Spalding agreed to represent the U.S. House of Representative after Obama changed positions and announced that the Justice Department no longer would defend DOMA in court, there were not only protests against King & Spalding, but threats to picket and protest clients of the firm who had nothing to do with the dispute. The threat that clients of the firm who were completely unconnected to the dispute would be harrasseed was enough to cause the firm to withdraw the representation...

I would not be surprised to see a similar reaction from the right to the left’s attacks on advertisers, but that would be a mistake.

What is happening goes beyond Obama’s call for people to argue with their neighbors and get in their faces. It goes far beyond Bill Clinton’s politics of personal destruction directed at accusers, and beyond name-calling by right wing pundits.

This total war, in which no one is allowed to be non-political and neighbors and clients become mere pressure points, is a dangerous development.

The whole thing is worth a read, and Jacobson's point is well-put: a political total war would be poisonous to the tradition of classical liberalism/conservatism. It seems to me that classical conservatism and classical liberalism in part often depend upon keeping a cultural space that is relatively insulated from the petty ideological controversies of the moment. This space can include much of everyday life, social traditions, certain kinds of cultural activities, and so forth. These activities are still open to political critique and commentary, but they often stand aside from the hand-to-hand battles of political warfare.

The New Left and, more broadly, the new radicalism preach a rather different creed: Alinskyite-style, these movements instead seek to permeate contemporary culture and society with ideological combat. The personal is the political, and everything is correspondingly politicized. These tactics have borne some fruit (witness many of the cultural changes of the past few decades), and there is a temptation for classical conservatives to ape these tactics. But this imitation would itself sell out the tradition of conservatism and consume non-politicized culture in the morass of ideological warfare.

Moreover, these past few decades (and days) have also seen the toxic confusion of principled critique and personal politicization, in which rallying one's "side" in an ideological war takes precedence over a sober analysis of political aims.

Which brings me to a few points about the saga of Sandra Fluke:

The often disgusting and mean-spirited comments aimed at Sandra Fluke do not disqualify---indeed, have nothing to do with---the principle that religious organizations should not be forced to pay for measures and procedures that go against the tenets of their faiths. Democrats have tried to confuse the personal (Ms. Fluke) with the political (the freedom of religion as guaranteed in the First Amendment), and some conservatives, by indulging in personal invective against Ms. Fluke (focusing on destroying her person rather than her arguments), have indirectly aided them in this confusion.

Should a religious organization be mandated to fund things that go against its core beliefs? Furthermore, is it acceptable for these mandates to be passed down by some executive branch official? Those are the questions at issue---not who wins some media game of gotcha or who can muster greater outrage. Conservatives can offer worthy, principled answers to those questions. Defending religious freedom is a winning issue for Republicans; getting mired in radical "progressive"-style debates about the personal-political, not so much.